The House of Vampires

No man ever forgets the moment he realizes that what he feared in dreams may walk beside him in waking life.

I was not a child when it began. I was thirty-seven. A cynic, a divorcee, a doctor with trembling hands and a heart bruised by the ethics I once cherished. The weight of humanity, once sacred, had become negotiable—a prescription here, a withheld treatment there. It wasn’t money I craved, but silence. Silence from the screams that lived in my conscience.

My escape was the countryside, a quaint village whose name has vanished in my memory like breath on a mirror. The locals never spoke above a whisper. Their smiles carried the weight of generations who had forgotten how to laugh. I rented a stone manor on the edge of town—Godwine Hall, they called it, though no one would say why. The keys were left without ceremony, dangling from a rusted nail by the gate, like someone had hoped I wouldn't arrive at all.

I should have heeded the omens.

The house was magnificent: high arches, twisted staircases, tapestries older than empires, and a smell that had no age, only presence. It was not the rot of decay but the perfume of something watching. The house inhaled me.

I slept the first night with unease, and the second with trembling hands. By the third night, I stopped sleeping altogether.

It began with sounds: soft footsteps above my room, though the floor was stone. Then came the creaking, a rhythmic shifting like an old woman rocking—but always in the walls. The third morning, I found the mirror cracked. Not shattered. Cracked—as though something behind it had pressed gently outward.

I wrote it off. Hallucination. Fatigue. My medical mind, ever defensive, called it trauma withdrawal. It had a name, so I trusted it.

But names are not cures.

On the fifth day, I met her.

She stood at the window on the top floor, pale as snowlight, a girl with long black hair and a gaze like hunger restrained. She did not blink. Her lips were red—not painted, not bitten, but red as arterial truth. She said her name was Elira.

“I live here,” she whispered, “but the house is not mine.”

I asked no questions. Her voice made me forget language. We dined that night in the ancient hall. The candelabras, untouched for decades, burned bright without wax. I did not eat. I watched her smile.

Over the next days, I returned to life. I began to smile. We spoke of poetry, death, betrayal, philosophy, and blood. Always blood.

“You’re a doctor,” she said one night, her head upon my shoulder, “Do you believe in healing the wicked?”

“I try,” I murmured.

“What if the wicked were victims too?”

I could not answer. Her questions were ropes, tying my soul into knots I didn’t know existed. There was an intelligence behind her gaze, old as language itself—affectionate, but tragic. Like a caged lion.

The seventh night broke everything.

I awoke to silence so complete it screamed. My door, which I always locked, stood open. The candles along the corridor were lit, though I had not lit them. At the end of the hall was Elira.

She was weeping.

Her tears were red.

“They’re awake,” she said, trembling. “I tried to hold them. But hunger is not chained forever.”

She turned and fled into the attic stair. I followed, my rationality unraveling behind me. As I ascended, I smelled it—something like rust and roses.

At the top was a door I had never noticed. Wooden, scorched black, etched with runes older than scripture.

Inside was the truth.

They sat in a circle. Six of them. Elderly in appearance, yet radiating a strength that mocked age. Their skin was gray, not dead but waiting. They did not breathe, not quite. Their eyes were white and pupil-less, but they saw me. Oh, how they saw.

“Do you judge us, Doctor?” one rasped.

I couldn’t speak. Not from fear. From awe. From the devastating knowledge that I had entered something eternal.

“We do not drink blood,” another hissed. “We drink despair. Sorrow. Pain. You gave us a banquet the moment you arrived.”

I fell to my knees.

“You came to escape guilt. But you brought it as meat.”

“Why me?” I whispered.

“Because you fed on others in silence. You watched people suffer. You called it ‘professional distance.’ We are only what you allowed yourself to become.”

I wanted to scream. But the cruelty was surgical, elegant. It pierced without violence. It exposed, not exploded. A scalpel, not a knife.

Then Elira appeared again, like a dream I didn’t deserve.

“She still believes in pity,” one of them muttered.

“She’s young,” another sneered. “A century old, barely.”

“Let him go,” she begged.

And for the first time, I saw her not as a woman, but as one of them. Her hunger was dormant, but alive. She was trying to starve herself into grace.

“You’re like me,” I said, choking.

“No,” she whispered. “I’m worse. Because I know what I am, and still I stay.”

“What are they?”

“Victims of their own cruelty. Vampires of the soul. They cannot die, because they no longer possess enough humanity to end.”

“And what am I?”

“A mirror.”

That night, they offered me a choice.

“Join us,” they said. “Not by bite, but by choice. Drink not blood, but secrets. Harvest not veins, but regrets. There is no immortality in blood. But memory… memory makes gods.”

I refused.

Or I tried.

But the hunger… it lives once seen. You cannot unlearn it. I fled the manor at dawn. Elira tried to stop me—not with words, but with eyes that said: You won’t survive outside either.

And she was right.

I walk cities now, but I see people differently. I hear the regrets they wear like perfume. I diagnose not illness, but shame. I treat not fever, but guilt.

And sometimes, late at night, when I see a patient whose soul has curdled from cowardice, I feel it in my throat—a thirst. Not for blood. For confession. For truth.

I have not returned to Godwine Hall. But I feel it within me. A mansion of remorse, with every room a memory, every corridor a compromise.

You ask me for a story?

Here it is.

I met the vampires.

And I did not need to be bitten to become one.